1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic device capable of processing various types of information.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, for an electronic device such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), in general, all elements are disposed on only one surface of a casing of the device in order not to impair operability. However, recently, while the miniaturization of PDAs is a requirement, the demand for the size of the display area of a liquid crystal monitor to be made larger has grown since functions for viewing video content have been installed. Accordingly, it is becoming difficult to secure space in which to dispose various operating units such as cursor keys and number input keys.
In order to solve the above problem, configurations as disclosed in Patent Document 1 (JP2002-6988A) and Patent Document 2 (JP2003-198703A) have been proposed. In Patent Document 1, a configuration in which an operating unit to which major functions of an electronic device are assigned is disposed on a front side of the casing of the device and an operating unit to which auxiliary functions are assigned is disposed on another side (e.g. back side) is disclosed. In Patent Document 2, a configuration in which operation buttons respectively are disposed on both sides of a mobile phone is disclosed.
However, in the configurations disclosed in Patent Documents 1 and 2, since both sides of the device are provided with operation buttons, when placing the device on a flat surface of a desk or the like, operation buttons disposed on either the front or back side come into contact with the flat surface, resulting in erroneous operation caused by such operation buttons being pressed by the self-weight of the device.